Delhi University teachers will hold a protest today against new regulations that increase their teaching load from 18 hours a week to 24.

In my other life, I am an assistant
professor of political science at a college in Delhi University. This year,
however, I have a welcome a break: I’m on a post-doctoral fellowship at a
research institution. For the first time
in over a decade as an academic, I have an office, a desktop PC and
more-or-less functional internet.

Last week, taking full advantage of these
luxuries, I sent out a silly group message to my friends on a social media site
in the middle of the day from my office computer. Within minutes, I received a
reply from one of the recipients – a friend who works in a regular office. By
regular I mean she has a desk, a computer and internet to herself for the
duration of her time in office. “Ah you’re at work, explains the quick response!”
I wrote to her on group chat. We both
knew it would be hours before we received a response from the other recipients of my message – all
lecturers at Delhi University.

They were also at work, but work for them involved
back-to-back lectures packed with too many students and too little time. On a
good day, they will manage to pack in a few minutes of rest between lectures in
the staff room and the harried canteen boy would have served tea quick enough
for them to make it to the next class without burning their tongues.

As for work stations or offices, forget it. With no demarcated physical space
they can call their own, they engage in mortal
combat with colleagues for precious locker space. Those at the bottom of
the hierarchy don’t even dare stake a claim – they are “ad hocs” and their fate
is to be washed away like rain in the monsoon semester or to crack like ice in
the winter semester. They carry their registers and books around on their
person, losing body fat and building rare muscle-groups in preparation for the
lean months of unemployment ahead.

And there's more...

Libraries are noisy, under-stocked places with outdated computers, patchy internet at best and a hundred students
taking a chance to gossip in the air-cooled space because the canteen and common
room are full. The university provides
wifi, but you would be lucky if it was working, and if it was, if you found
a quiet corner to work, or even check Facebook.

Increasingly, time between classes (if
any) is taken up by endless meetings and admin work, or teachers find
themselves on extra-curricular duty, sitting in college auditoria or dusty
lawns until dusk, watching rehearsals or trials of numerous student societies
for the nth time. As they move from lecture to lecture, clocking 18 hours of class time a week – a one
of the highest in the world (in India we teach more direct hours than
counterparts not only in the US, Europe and Australia, but in Latin America
and Africa), they carry laughable relics of the past – bulky attendance
registers that would put a munshi to shame. At the start of each semester, they
hand-copy students’ names into the register, carefully making partitions for
the up to four different courses they may find themselves teaching, depending
on the state of divine grace that year. In any case, it’s never less than what
is respectfully called a 2-2 load in the US – two courses each semester.

In the past few years, roll call has begun
to take up to a quarter of class time as intake of students has swelled to
accommodate the Other Backward Classes reservations policy. Many of us support reservations in a
country where quality higher education is out of reach for a staggering
majority of school graduates. But the joke is clearly on us, since higher
student intake has not been matched by a greater
recruitmentof faculty. So classes have bloated to unmanageable proportions
and quality has inevitably dropped. Some of us drily remark privately that it’s
a relief that 15 minutes are spent on roll call, since we can only stand
shouting over the general din of 75 students stuffed into a classroom meant for
40 for the remaining 45 minutes. I have often had to step over students squatting
on the floor to get to my desk, and if the class was near the (air-conditioned)
staff room, I would run out to it, take deep gulps of cold air and run back to
my sauna chamber of a classroom.

A joke gone sour

It’s all very funny. Indeed, until a few
years ago, hopelessly in love with our work, my colleagues and I would eat our
lunch communally and guffaw about these events. There was a sense of pride in
overcoming daily challenges and being in this together, since ultimately, the
classroom was our space, and nobody could take that away from us. Unlike other
professions, we didn’t have bosses breathing down our necks. Inside the
sovereign kingdom of our classroom, we had what most human beings value most –
freedom and creativity. If we did our jobs well, that sense of freedom and
discovery would infect students and be multiplied several times over, leading
to miraculous long-term results.

Over the years however, with the barrage of
ill-thought-out systemic changes to higher education in India, the laughter has
dried up. Admittedly, there is a section of teachers – usually associate
professors close to retirement – who are both less affected by the new changes,
having already reached the limit of their promotions and pay, and too tired or
jaded to complain. But for all others and most of all for the floating
population of ad hocs, each day is chaotic, exhausting and often humiliating.
There is a sense that the wider world has stopped caring what we do and how we
do it, and the respect that was traditionally shown to teachers has whittled
down to barely concealed contempt.

We are under-paid compared to our private-sector counterparts with comparable levels of training and higher education.
Students, with the merciless acuity of the young, are quick to pick up on these
internal and external hierarchies. A few years ago, one came to me after a
class and enquired with genuine curiosity and concern, “You are quite bright,
why don’t you think of joining the IAS?” I should have known then that that
tactless if heartfelt comment was the beginning of the slide.

Killing originality

It’s obscene that in these hierarchies,
bureaucrats and politicians who are there because at best, they passed a highly
competitive but seriously skewed national examination, are clearly above us.
They depend on good teachers to get where they are, and suddenly develop
notions like the disastrous new ordinance released by the University Grants
Commission. One of the central pillars of this new ordinance is
increase in direct teaching hours from 18 a week to 24, thus obliterating in one
fell swoop the cautious gains of previous regulations (which had given a relief
of four hours for associate professors and two hours for assistant professors);
and more alarmingly, putting thousands of ad hoc teachers out of work.

When the teachers bodies protested initially, the Human Resource Development ministry and UGC put out dissembling, misleading clarifications and modifications that included a friendly suggestion that we drop the research component of the points system for promotion. No let-up in teaching hours, no increase in facilities, draconian requirements for appointment and promotion in a crumbling system including publishing only in UGC-approved journals (oh the farce!), but let’s jettison the most creative and intellectually satisfying part of an academic’s life. No original thinking please, we’re Indian.

One can venture hundreds of explanations about the callousness with which education policy is decided in India but I have a sneaking suspicion that at the bottom of it all is pure spite. One of Karl Marx’s most prescient and profound observations was that capitalism would not rest easy until the managers had become as miserable as the workers. It explains why those outside teaching – including bureaucrats – begrudge us our job satisfaction. Until recently, it was one of the few white-collar professions that was not drudgerous and exploitative, save for the pay. The managers of education are determined to make us as miserable as themselves and as the scores of blue-collar workers in the country. The odd, selective pay increase they wave in our faces every few years is just lipstick on a pig.

Adopting three simple habits can help maximise the benefits of existing sanitation infrastructure.

India’s sanitation problem is well documented – the country was recently declared as having the highest number of people living without basic sanitation facilities. Sanitation encompasses all conditions relating to public health - especially sewage disposal and access to clean drinking water. Due to associated losses in productivity caused by sickness, increased healthcare costs and increased mortality, India recorded a loss of 5.2% of its GDP to poor sanitation in 2015. As tremendous as the economic losses are, the on-ground, human consequences of poor sanitation are grim - about one in 10 deaths, according to the World Bank.

Poor sanitation contributes to about 10% of the world’s disease burden and is linked to even those diseases that may not present any correlation at first. For example, while lack of nutrition is a direct cause of anaemia, poor sanitation can contribute to the problem by causing intestinal diseases which prevent people from absorbing nutrition from their food. In fact, a study found a correlation between improved sanitation and reduced prevalence of anaemia in 14 Indian states. Diarrhoeal diseases, the most well-known consequence of poor sanitation, are the third largest cause of child mortality in India. They are also linked to undernutrition and stunting in children - 38% of Indian children exhibit stunted growth. Improved sanitation can also help reduce prevalence of neglected tropical diseases (NTDs). Though not a cause of high mortality rate, NTDs impair physical and cognitive development, contribute to mother and child illness and death and affect overall productivity. NTDs caused by parasitic worms - such as hookworms, whipworms etc. - infect millions every year and spread through open defecation. Improving toilet access and access to clean drinking water can significantly boost disease control programmes for diarrhoea, NTDs and other correlated conditions.

Unfortunately, with about 732 million people who have no access to toilets, India currently accounts for more than half of the world population that defecates in the open. India also accounts for the largest rural population living without access to clean water. Only 16% of India’s rural population is currently served by piped water.

However, there is cause for optimism. In the three years of Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, the country’s sanitation coverage has risen from 39% to 65% and eight states and Union Territories have been declared open defecation free. But lasting change cannot be ensured by the proliferation of sanitation infrastructure alone. Ensuring the usage of toilets is as important as building them, more so due to the cultural preference for open defecation in rural India.

According to the World Bank, hygiene promotion is essential to realise the potential of infrastructure investments in sanitation. Behavioural intervention is most successful when it targets few behaviours with the most potential for impact. An area of public health where behavioural training has made an impact is WASH - water, sanitation and hygiene - a key issue of UN Sustainable Development Goal 6. Compliance to WASH practices has the potential to reduce illness and death, poverty and improve overall socio-economic development. The UN has even marked observance days for each - World Water Day for water (22 March), World Toilet Day for sanitation (19 November) and Global Handwashing Day for hygiene (15 October).

At its simplest, the benefits of WASH can be availed through three simple habits that safeguard against disease - washing hands before eating, drinking clean water and using a clean toilet. Handwashing and use of toilets are some of the most important behavioural interventions that keep diarrhoeal diseases from spreading, while clean drinking water is essential to prevent water-borne diseases and adverse health effects of toxic contaminants. In India, Hindustan Unilever Limited launched the Swachh Aadat Swachh Bharat initiative, a WASH behaviour change programme, to complement the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan. Through its on-ground behaviour change model, SASB seeks to promote the three basic WASH habits to create long-lasting personal hygiene compliance among the populations it serves.

This touching film made as a part of SASB’s awareness campaign shows how lack of knowledge of basic hygiene practices means children miss out on developmental milestones due to preventable diseases.

Play

SASB created the Swachhata curriculum, a textbook to encourage adoption of personal hygiene among school going children. It makes use of conceptual learning to teach primary school students about cleanliness, germs and clean habits in an engaging manner. Swachh Basti is an extensive urban outreach programme for sensitising urban slum residents about WASH habits through demos, skits and etc. in partnership with key local stakeholders such as doctors, anganwadi workers and support groups. In Ghatkopar, Mumbai, HUL built the first-of-its-kind Suvidha Centre - an urban water, hygiene and sanitation community centre. It provides toilets, handwashing and shower facilities, safe drinking water and state-of-the-art laundry operations at an affordable cost to about 1,500 residents of the area.

HUL’s factory workers also act as Swachhata Doots, or messengers of change who teach the three habits of WASH in their own villages. This mobile-led rural behaviour change communication model also provides a volunteering opportunity to those who are busy but wish to make a difference. A toolkit especially designed for this purpose helps volunteers approach, explain and teach people in their immediate vicinity - their drivers, cooks, domestic helps etc. - about the three simple habits for better hygiene. This helps cast the net of awareness wider as regular interaction is conducive to habit formation. To learn more about their volunteering programme, click here. To learn more about the Swachh Aadat Swachh Bharat initiative, click here.

This article was produced by the Scroll marketing team on behalf of Hindustan Unilever and not by the Scroll editorial team.